Audi RS3 2011 Review - International

All you need to know about Audi's RS3 is this: its five-cylinder engine sounds awesome, it's huge, trustworthy fun to fling around and it's faster in a straight-line sprint than BMW's V8-powered M3. And it gets there with a raucous, warbling howl that's every bit as enticing as the M3's bent-eight bellow.

For that matter, with a 0-100km/h time of only 4.6 seconds, it would lose the sprint to Audi's flagship R8 V10 supercar, but only by 0.3 seconds.

So the impatient can grab their phones and berate Audi right now for having no plans to bring it to Australia!

All this performance has been shoehorned into what was, until last year, Audi's cheapest car and, because it's only available in the five-door version of the A3 bodyshell, it's a stokingly hot hatch that's also immensely practical. The ride height is only 10mm lower than the already-potent S3 and the tyres are more aggressively sporty, with a far lower profile, yet it tackles short, sharp bumps with an aplomb that easily matches the taller Q5 (we know, because we back-to-backed them over the same road). There is a practical rear seat that can, at a pinch, carry three people and luggage space that can carry plenty, too.

But if you stay for the usability of it, you'll come for the engine and the gearbox. They, combined, are brilliant.

There's nothing else out there that sounds remotely like Audi's hotshot five-pot, and that's a good thing. Even at idle, it's meaty and rich and smooth and menacing. The in-line, five-cylinder engine has 2.5 litres of internal space and is shared directly with the TT RS, so it's well proven already.

It isn't the RS3's sheer numbers that impress you most; rather, it's the enormous breadth of its ability. There's 250kW of power there, for sure, but there's also 450Nm of torque and, what's more, it arrives at an incredibly low 1600rpm and stays until 5300. That means the little hatchback is giving its absolute best across a full 75 percent of its rev range, which must be something of a first.

Normally, you need to wait until the revs have climbed up and up, then the torque peak is reached and then you wait even longer until it's the power peak. Not here. The power peak, like a table mountain, is a flat line from 5400 to 6500rpm and it still howls to 6800 revs.

While the lack of a linear progression in performance can make in-gear acceleration feel slightly less of an event than the stopwatch insists it should be, the flipside is that any time you go for the throttle, in any gear, the RS3 pricks up its ears and rockets forward. Then it keeps rocketing forward all the way through the rev range.

It might not build up, but it's punching harder, earlier, and neither does it let up anywhere. Overtaking, needless to say, is a doddle, and it's still precise enough in its responses to let you adjust it mid corner.

But there's another trick up its sleeve, because the double-clutch seven-speed gearbox feels like a gem of a critter. Admittedly, there are times when you'd like to feel a gear stick sliding through a gate, but most of the time it can only be a good thing to have something as smooth as an auto when you can't be bothered and then faster than a manual when you can be bothered.

In Sport mode, the RS3 disdainfully flicks though its cogs with a small, defined and short “braaap” before the mighty powerhouse gets back down to work. Brake hard and it blips perfectly, every time, as it makes the engine revs match the spinning speed of the shorter cog it's switching to.
It's near-perfect in a near-perfect combination, baulked only slightly by the plastic steering wheel-mounted shift paddles (for manual mode) feeling slightly cheaper than you'd expect.

It helps immensely that the RS3's all-wheel drive system dispenses with all that power and torque easily and comfortably, even on ice and snow.

In fact, so much of the RS3's drive can be sent to the rear end that the five-door hatch can be pitched into long, languid four-wheel drifts on ice and you can steer it using either the steering wheel or the throttle, depending on what takes your fancy, or you can use both at the same time.

While we had only limited mileage in the RS3 on tarmac roads (most of our time was spent on snow and ice), Quattro boss Stephan Reil says it laps around 11 seconds slower than the TT RS around the Nurburgring's Nordschleife, mainly due to its taller ride height, heavier weight and different gearing.

One of the few significant flaws is the steering, which is frankly a bit ordinary. It runs a fully linear system and Quattro stretched the front track 22mm to give it a sharper, more precise turn-in bite, but it still doesn't offer bountiful feedback. Maybe it was just the ice…

That wider track proved a problem and Reil's team gave it its bulging wheel arches by using carbon-fibre front quarter panels. Expensive, huh? You don't even get that on the R8. The rear end was simpler. It would have cost too much to change the whole side panel, so they found a bit more track width by simply changing the wheel offsets.

Steering apart, on the surfaces we drove it on, the RS3 felt like a little gem. With the ESP set to Sport, you could choose what cornering stance you wanted: from slow in-fast out to safe-as-houses understeer to yee-haa oversteering blasts. It didn't seem to worry it and it had it all on offer for you.

The thing was that it felt incredibly intuitive in its chassis (steering apart) and you could fling it around as an extension of your own limbs, skating and dancing in a constant, bellowing slide if that's what you were after. If you preferred a quieter drive, it happily poked along driving neatly and tidily on part throttle.

There are typically grippy and well-bolstered Alcantara seats up front and a lovely, thick-rimmed steering wheel, but the basic A3 layout is starting to feel a bit old and the MMI screen is small by more contemporary standards.

This then, is one of the most impressive hot hatches around, with a rare combination of speed, practicality and prestige, plus drivability which adds up to a whole lot of fun. The shame of it is that it's not slated for Australia. And that Audi waited until the A3's last two years of life.

If only they'd launched the A3 with this thing as the flagship…

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